CNBC story: A hospital's mistake paralyzes a designer, he got a unique settlement.

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A hospital's mistake paralyzes a designer. He got $20M, and an unusual promise

Most people wouldn't want to have anything to do with a hospital after suing it for paralyzing them, and winning a $20 million settlement.
August de los Reyes isn't most people.

A former top Microsoft designer, de los Reyes became a paraplegic after a visit to Overlake Hospital Medical Center in Bellevue, Washington. His repeated warnings that he might have suffered a back fracture weren't properly heeded by doctors and others at the institution, which left him confined to a wheelchair.
The hospital itself told CNBC was "the result of tragic circumstances related to communications breakdowns between members of his care team."
As part of his new legal settlement with the hospital, which agreed to pay him $20 million, de los Reyes also got Overlake to agree to work with him on analyzing how and why things went wrong for him, conducting what he said would be "a case study."
"For selfish reasons I just want to know where this broke down and why this happened," de los Reyes said. The 45-year-old was hired by Microsoft in 2003. He spent seven years at the technology behemoth before departing, only to return in 2013 to head Microsoft's Xbox design team. Last month, de los Reyes left Microsoft to become design manager at Pinterest, the web and mobile application company.
The ultimate goal of the case study, which has already seen two meetings between de los Reyes and top Overlake brass, is to take the lessons learned and develop solutions that can be applied at Overlake ? and potentially other hospitals.
As part of that effort, he is tapping a network of designers to bring their expertise at identifying problems in systems, and crafting solutions.

A tragic outcome. Too bad he did not go straight to a major trauma center like Harborview first instead of going to a community hospital like this, but it is inexcusable that they did not pursue better screening for a spinal fracture after a fall was reported by a person with AS.

I was also sent home!

[QUOTE=SCI-Nurse;1803620]A tragic outcome. Too bad he did not go straight to a major trauma center like Harborview first instead of going to a community hospital like this, but it is inexcusable that they did not pursue better screening for a spinal fracture after a fall was reported by a person with AS.

I fell on ice in my driveway. My daughters encouraged me to go to the ER. Was sent home after they gave a shot of torodol with prescriptions for pain patches (my insurance told the pharmacy they needed a prior approval for...never got), tramadol and muscle relaxers. Never even bothered to do an x-ray. Told me to come back if I didn't feel better after a couple of days. Two days later I could hardly move and the pain was no better at all. This time a different Dr. did a CT scan, but didn't feel good about releasing me, so kept me overnight to run an MRI the following morning. At that point they discovered I had a compression fracture of my L-1 vertebrae with bone fragments in my spinal column. My daughters were livid. You see I was going to go to work that morning driving a full sized school bus. Thank goodness I could hardly move and decided to call in sick.
This just happened the first week of this year!
This isn't the first time something like this has happened either. In 2013 I had kidney stones. Went to ER and was sent home with pain meds. Ended back there the same night. Turned out it wasn't just pain from passing two small stones, a 1.7 centimeter stone had blocked the flow of urine from my left kidney and the kidney was swelled up. Ambulanced to larger hospital for a kidney stent to push the stone out of the way.